because LIFE is uncomfortable. Death and suicide and sex and pain are straight up going to happen. not having words for the way it discomforts you doesn’t make it more comfortable, it just makes you less able to reach out about it.
even more vital, you gotta be able to say words like “rape”, “abuse”, “queer” or “racist”. cause we fought fucking hard to name those experiences. to identify “rape” as distinct from “sex” and “racism” as distinct from “acceptable behaviour” and “queer” as distinct from “invert”
like the function of communication is not to minimise immediate discomfort. we gotta be able to talk about stuff that’s hard or sucks or causes difficult conversations.
This is what’s so goddamn terrifying about the Internet slowly collapsing into the same 3-5 websites–if Facebook deprioritizes you for saying “sex” and TikTok shadowbans you for saying “suicide” and Twitter X locks your account for saying “racism” we’ve lost a lot more than just the culture of the old weird internet
God I hate these fucking floating monoliths. They always go, like, 10mph below the speed limit and if you try to pass them they just fucking distort reality around them until you’re back behind them again. One of them cut me off on the highway once and when I honked it banished me to a hoary netherworld where I wandered, lost and alone, for untold centuries, trapped in the liminal space between what could have been and what never was, black stars dotting the bright infinity yawning out around me as I drove out of thought and time, through endless ruined cities and blighted lands unmarked by the sun’s cold rays, and when I finally got out I was more than 20m late for my dentist appointment and they had to reschedule me.
In the spirit of encouraging people to comment on fanfics while also making it easier to do so, I feel obliged to share a browser extension for ao3 that has quite literally revolutionized the comment game for me.
I present to you: the floating ao3 comment box!
From what I’ve seen, a big problem for many people is that once you reach the comments at the bottom of a fic, your memory of it miraculously disappears. Anything you wanted to say is stuck ten paragraphs ago, and you barely remember what you thought while reading. This fixes that!
I’ll give a little explanation on the features and how it works, but if you want to skip all that, here’s the link.
The extension is visible as a small blue box in the upper left corner.
(Side note: The green colouring is not from the extension, that’s me.)
If you click on it, you open a comment box window at the bottom of your screen but not at the bottom of the fic. I opened my own fic for demonstrative purposes.
The website also gives explanations on how exactly it functions, but I’ll summarize regardless.
insert selection -> if you highlight a sentence in the fic it will be added in italics to the comment box
add to comment box -> once you’re done writing your comment, you click this button and the entire thing will automatically copied to the ao3 comment box
delete -> self explanatory
on mulitchapter fics, you will be given the option to either add the comment to just the current chapter or the entire fic
The best part? You can simply close the window the same way you opened it and your progress will automatically be saved. So you can open it, comment on a paragraph, and then close it and keep reading without having the box in your face.
Comments are what keep writers going, and as both a writer and a reader, I think it’s such an easy way of showing support and enthusiasm.
